


The Zapruder Chronicles, 2038

by Charles_Rockafellor



Series: Earth One (Orion Earth) [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe, Conspiracy, Detective, F/M, Flat Earth, Future Fic, Private Investigator, mandela effect
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24369439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/pseuds/Charles_Rockafellor
Summary: What do you think would happen if every news channel reported that the Earth really were flat, that a huge conspiracy had suddenly broken and details were shaking the very foundations of the world?Note: this story crosses over between two different Icewall series, the URLs thereof being noted below.Earth One (Orion Earth) seriesEarth Two (Sagittarius Earth) seriesPlease seemy Icewall mapin order to see where each world lies relative to the rest.𝑫𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝑳𝒊𝒌𝒆, 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑺𝒖𝒃𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒃𝒆! ❤️
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Series: Earth One (Orion Earth) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1778659
Collections: Icewall





	1. A little sidestep

There I am, reading today's newspaper, when “legs” walks in. She starts telling me this rambling story, nuttier than a fruitcake in the middle of summer. The dame is smoking, but wants to hire me to find her world.

I look out the window at the city, the grand canal, the telluric-aether condensing pyramid, the soaring multi-kiloton poured-geopolymeric basalt statues – bigger than buildings – at aesthetically pleasing intervals; I listen to her talk about murders and wars, a world filled with insane violence that's as casual about it as picking a piece of fruit from the municipal trees lining the walkways. A world where every business, every citizen, spews caustic waste into the air and water, knowingly destroying the land and ecology with chemicals that will live for a thousand years.

Her story goes on in detail, a bizarre delusion, but with only normal inconsistencies. I still don't see her angle here; she's gotta be one of Delaney's boys here to put in a fix, but somehow I don't see it. It's like her story holds water, and some level of my gut knows it. It's an interesting spiel, I have to give her that. She says she'd thought it was a joke when others claimed it, or were simply lying when they'd said the same of their spouses they'd called “walk ins.” That they'd been Mandected – Mandela Affected, whatever that is – and how maybe sometimes people got Mandected but didn't realize it.

That gets my attention. I've seen a couple of cases like that; damnedest things.

Reflecting on this as I wiggle the tip of my pinky around in one ear I realize that it's tinnitus. Never noticed that before.

I still don't see how anyone could somehow not notice they're in the wrong world, but...

I look out the window again, thinking how things could be different... our skyscrapers no longer crumbling, all the crime in the city and political scandals gone, air that didn't kill you in a few decades, water that fell from the sky and wasn't rationed and put through a dozen purification processes before you could touch it safely... a world where people just get along?

_Damnedest thing._

**O ~~~ O**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story above began on Earth Two (Sagittarius Earth). Following the protagonist's Mandection, future chapters will unfold on Earth One (Orion Earth). As such, this story represents a crossover between the two series.
> 
> ▐► Earth One (Orion Earth) series: <https://archiveofourown.org/series/1778659>  
> ▐► Earth Two (Sagittarius Earth) series: <https://archiveofourown.org/series/1778668>


	2. Islands in the Abyss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story began on Earth Two (Sagittarius Earth) in chapter one. Following the protagonist's Mandection therein, he is now one Earth One (Orion Earth). As such, this story represents a crossover between the two series.
> 
> [Earth One (Orion Earth) series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1778659)  
>  [Earth Two (Sagittarius Earth) series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1778668)  
> 
> 
> * * *

Earth 1, Orion Earth: an art major's short film, “ _Islands in the Abyss_ ,” takes a look at conspiracy theories and conspiracy-driven movies, in particular “ _The Island_ ” and “ _Parts: the Clonus Horror_.”

Horror-mockumentary points to disappearances in D.C. far in excess of local population and statistical explanation. Narrator wonders where in the world so many people could possibly disappear to each year, the numbers amounting to a large city of some eight million per annum, worldwide. He speculates that so many bodies would surely be discovered over time, hence must instead be going somewhere – and some places in the world are off limits, de facto or de jure, such as the Bermuda Triangle and Antarctica. Perhaps these are their ultimate destinations, or perhaps merely intermediate staging areas. To what end he can only speculate: sex slave rings, organ harvesting, Satanic rituals, cannibalistic feasts, or even shipped off-world for alien experimentation and zoos.

8mm film runs out, Detective Zapruder still taking notes.

Zapruder-same-spelling-no-relation he would always say to forestall the inevitable, and they'd always always ask if he were sure and had he checked his family tree because you never knew, and then they'd trot out the same tired handful of jokes as if they were geniuses and nobody had ever made those exact same jokes a million times before. Once in a blue, someone would commiserate over this, pointing out their own name having some fame... and nine out of ten, their own name was something that he'd never heard of – and probably nobody else ever had either, and it was certainly never anything nearly on par with a _Roosevelt_ , or a _Yamato_ , or anything like that – but he'd be obliged to nod as if they really understood his woes.

“ _Per annum_ ,” he snorted; _pretentious and stilted_ , he thought, _but he wasn't wrong_. The student had connected so many dots that had previously seemed unrelated that Det. Zapruder now felt the uncomfortable heat that came with gut certainty.

He would have to tread very lightly indeed, if his hunches were correct.

Speaking of “lightly,” he was beginning to feel lightheaded, as if he'd been standing next to an active microwave for a few minutes. If he hadn't known any better, he'd have suspected someone of targeting him with one after having watched this kid's film.

Chuckling to himself, he finished his coffee and stale doughnut, then closed his notepad and shoved it into his pocket. The wireless signal on the campus was beginning to give him a headache. His captain wondered when he'd get with the program and update to modern electronics. Well, pen and paper didn't need recharging and couldn't get hacked or develop bit decay or suffer HDD crash.

He looked around the room as he pulled out a cigarette. It was some new brand that his doctor had prescribed. They didn't seem to pep him up any more than the old brand, but they were a bit smoother.

 _Surprised he didn't hit on the_ Aphrodite _mission as being a Mars Landing Hoax._

_So. Where'd the kid go after he finished watching his latest cut?_

_It's two in the morning, I'm twenty years old, just finished watching my latest and greatest..._

Dismissing the dedicated _Polybius_ server as irrelevant, given its thick layer of dust, he stepped over to the kitchenette. Three day old pizza lay entombed in its box. Two empty beer bottles sat at the bottom of the garbage can. Some mass-produced garbage.

Artsy socially-conscious college kids and their “ _Support the economy!_ ” battle cry. What was wrong with a simple, traditional, locally micro-brewed pale ale?

**_Flash-forward:_** The Captain called him off of the case. The kid had suicided, double-tapping himself, head and heart, from twenty feet in a locked room. He'd stopped taking his prescribed heroin and flipped his lid, simply couldn't take the pressure of two hours of classes per week.

There was a lot of that going around.

2038 was shaping up to be one hell of a year, and it wasn't even a week old yet.

Problem was: he was seeing hands and eyes and “M”s and “Shh!” signs everywhere now – spiraled triangles and circles and hearts and butterflies, owls, bunny ears and other butterflies, bathtubs, star tattoos and logos, patterns of red and blue, lightning bolts above and checkerboards below, the four-cornered “X” code, vortices and snakes and eagle wings... all of the rambling bits that the kid hadn't yet strung together coherently must have made an impression on him subconsciously, 'cause he was connecting dots that just couldn't be there, and it was happening more and more all of the time.

_...you could be better off than you are,_  
_you could be swingin' from a star..._

Yeah, he wouldn't be singing that song any time soon without all of this coming back to mind.

Or singing it at all, at this point.

Or wishing upon any stars, much less falling ones. Or _fallen_ ones, come to that.

Passing by a public TV screen, he caught a snippet of some politician saying that his son's last words were that he'd begged his father not to give up on the race, to stay in the game, keep his eyes on the prize, to win it for him.

 _Cute speech_ , he thought, _but was that his kid's thing, or his speechwriters', or his attempt to cover his own lack of feeling... or was the kid some weird ritual sacrifice in a bid for power?_

_**Flash-forward:**_ The film student had been two weeks prior. Now the case was closed and the least of his worries.

What was now being called “Wikivirus Day” had hit, and millions of names were named.

His Captain was nowhere to be found, along with half of the vice squad, even with a BOLO.

He used to be a PI. That had all changed when _Legs_ had walked into his life. He'd had no good reason to believe her crazy story about a better place, but he'd done so anyway and still did.

She'd stayed at his place for a bit while he'd looked into everything that she'd been able to tell him about anything that led up to her arrival here, and everything since then, but he'd failed to find her home world. Big surprise.

They'd dated for a while, messed around a bit – and still did, sometimes – and discovered that they were really just better as friends. They still lived together, but that was all. They understood something on some fundamental level that nobody else was even aware of, at least not beyond a few people with crackpot claims and half a dozen completely different wild guesses that each and every one of them was positive were absolute truth.

He'd gone into policing because he'd gotten tired of being a PI. That had happened after looking into everything that she'd said, and finding himself comparing her story to the world around him. He'd wanted to actually make a difference, to stop people doing the things that being a PI simply discovered their doing.

He wasn't so sure that there as much of a point anymore.

Carnies, actors, entertainers, shrinks and a Tavistock cabal, secret societies with inhuman ritual abuse and controlled programming treatments, false flags and PsyOps running things, much like _Mission Earth_? Mainstream media faking their news reports about war atrocities and viral outbreaks and mass shootings? An oblique reference to something called “LXX” that he didn't quite get. It was all ridiculous... until he remembered something from the film, a quick aside in which the kid had noted rainmaking and denial technology cited in a 3 July 1972 New York Times article as having been used on the Hồ Chí Minh trail – if they had, and yet claimed later on in the twenty-teens to have _only then begun_ experimenting with WX... It was the same kind of open question as the kid had brought up with von Braun's gravestone making reference to Psalms 19:1, an admittedly odd choice for a Nazi rocket scientist, which was made even more unsettling by the choice of names for Operations Fishbowl, Dominic, and Highjump.

They'd put “Soylent Green” on the market, so named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to some old movie. It was lab-grown meat from human stem cells, marketed as clean, nutritious, and free of cruelty to animals.

Then there were files telling all about a planned false flag event centered on an alien-invasion deception. That sort of lined up with recent reports of UFO sightings and rumors of government reports to become declassified and something that von Braun was supposed to have told his secretary right before he'd died.

It was the end of the world as he knew it, and he _didn't_ feel fine.

He wondered how the kids would take it. The twenty- and thirty-somethings. From his perspective, they were conservatives without triggers, having grown up almost as sheep in reaction to the hair-trigger nature of the previous generation. He stood in between them, a bit too old to be the one, and born a bit late to really be the other.

That got him thinking about the One-dentity RFID with its glowing vaxx-indicator. What was the point of that, anyway? What about herd immunity making it unnecessary?

The military power blocs had said decades ago not to use OTC DNA-testing companies, and maintained that mandate to this very day. Why?

As he read through the WV articles on that, they linked with other articles about, and patents for, gene-targeted RF-induced cancer.

 _This really is the apocalypse,_ he chuckled to himself wryly, _an unveiling_. With everything going the way that it was going, it left open only one question, really; it was a question that a friend had asked him when he was considering joining the force: will you serve your master, or serve yourself?

 _That's an easy one: none of the above, you just serve what's_ right _._

He could read between the lines of writing on the wall. Add human nature and water and mix...

_Oompa Loompa, doompa-dee-doo,_  
_what will you do_  
_when they're coming for you?_  
_Oompa Loompa, doompa-dee-dee,_  
_what will they do_  
_when their problem_  
_is_  
_me?_

In response to what the WV files were unveiling for all to see, every single news channel, station, and website seemed to be saying the exact same thing across the board – literally verbatim: _fake news was the biggest threat and extremely dangerous to society everywhere, and that their greatest responsibility was to serve their community with the quality of balanced journalism that they produced, and how concerned they were over the biased and irresponsible one-sided news stories that were plaguing the world, as well as over how the sharing of false news had become all too common on social media._

The WV files listed groups in four categories: innocent, infiltrated, gateway, or Luciferian front.

The WV files also listed names in a similar breakdown: paladins, clueless, complicit, or active.

Files had photos; photos had albums. Hundreds and thousands of the same thing: either a clear occurrence of heinous wrong-doing, or the inexplicable presence of a seemingly innocuous but utterly incongruent gesture, almost like flashing gang-sign; sometimes both.

He and Legs were both on the clueless list, though indicated as leaning toward paladin. That was nice. They were also both annotated as being maybe-naturally Mandected. That was... not exactly reassuring, but something.

**O ~~~ O**


	3. An empire of logic

Tesla's transmitter and Rife's machines co-opted, water-electrolyzing car engines, Heaviside's suppressed half of Maxwell's equations... it was all there and being used by whom?

That's the part that Capt Zapruder was still trying to unravel.

All of the files showed everything about the _whats_ , but never explained any of the _whys_.

And now invisible epidemics were washing through the city. Bacteriologists, virologists, mycologists, epidemiologists – hell, even nutritionists and new age gurus were stymied, and they always claimed to have all of the answers. There was no apparent vector,

it just hit you and bang, you were dead. Sometimes it seemed to be just one thing, other times you'd look at the same data and swear that they stemmed from a few different plagues.

Two hundred one people dead per day, on average. 201.

That sounded like a lot, but actually came out to be something like a slightly heavy but basically normal flu season. The weather had been unusually extreme lately, and that probably contributed a bit...

There were about fifteen or twenty hospitals in the area, depending on how you counted them, or the radius that you were considering. Ten or more deaths each day, per hospital. Again, the numbers were consistent with normal background rates.

Twenty three pockets of high density occurrence.

Thirty three separate initiatives launched by anonymous groups to combat the matter. Why so many? Wouldn't they be better off pooling their resources? Something “funny” there...

Maybe he just didn't have the right angle, but reversing not-quite-everything's meaning took a real knack to decipher.

One thing was certain: the timing stank, or his name wasn't Marcellus.

OK, so it wasn't “ _Marcellus_ ,” but that was beside the point.

Wasn't there a doc back in the '20s – the 2020s – who'd gone on about some virus not being the cause of whatever disease?

He sat there doodling, picturing electromagnetic fields from electrical wiring, oxygen valence electrons and inoculation materials...

For some reason, he pictured the fields' interaction with cells' exosomes as occurring in red.

He let his mind stay empty, watching where it wandered on its own.

Red.

Control color.

_But how does it all connect?_

**O ~~~ O**


End file.
